New Zealand papers and The Associated Press are some of the media barred from covering the big Cricket Australia tournament because they refuse to sign agreements giving tournament organizers control of their pictures and stories, according to a story by The Australian.

Kudos to Reuters, AP, and the newspapers for standing united against this growing problem in athletic events. Cricket Australia wanted media to sign contracts that would give CA the right to control where their content is posted online. The CA spokesman said, “We’re happy for (material) to go to bona fide news sites but we have a concern about it going to questionable sites.”

Journalists should not yield to these forms of censorship and control over content, including policies enforced by the NFL and high school athletic associations. In order for getting field and press box access, journalists are providing these organizations the rights to their photos and video, or limiting their ability to post video online. It’s all about money. The NFL wants to control online content and the high school groups want to sell reprint photos to parents at outrageous prices (so they want to prevent newspapers from selling reprints to have a lock on the market, even though we newspapers don’t make much money from reprints – it’s about community service and good will).

If this is happening in your state, stand united against these efforts to control your content. Do not sign these contracts. Refuse to cover the events and tell readers/viewers why. Many of these groups are subsidized fully or in part by taxpayers. Turn and fight, and then hold the line!

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will no longer make docket information secret. The court had sealed files and even the existence of files until The Legal Intelligencer challenged the secrecy. The U.S. Supreme Court was to hear the case but last week the 3rd Circuit decided to change its policies and prohibit making dockets secret. The Supreme Court decided Monday not to hear the case.

Good thing the 3rd Circuit, which covers New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, saw the light, but too bad the Supreme Court didn’t take up the issue and send a strong message nationwide that court dockets should not be secret. To hide that a case even exists smacks of Stalinist Russia. If that is allowed then the government could secretly roust someone out of bed and secretly imprison them without anyone knowing. Scary stuff.

Dozens of open-government groups, including SPJ, have provided President-elect Barack Obama a list of suggestions for improving government transparency. OMB Watch led the effort to produce the “21st Century Right to Know Recommendations.”

Former SPJ President Robert Leger and I had the opportunity of attending a session in Baltimore last month to draft the recommendations. I was impressed with the broad support for open government. The 112-page document includes recommendations that Obama instruct agencies to operate more openly, reduce use of the executive privilege, and put more records online.

We hope Obama will take the recommendations seriously. It’s time for change.

Bloomberg is suing the Federal Reserve Board to find out who is receiving the $2 trillion in federal loans and what kind of collateral has been given to taxpayers to support those loans. By the way, this has nothing to do with that $700 billion taxpayer bailout of the banking industry. This is money the feds have given out for the past several months, in secret. See a great analysis by Columbia Journalism Review and the actual court filing by Bloomberg.

This is important stuff. That’s a huge amount of our money, being managed by people we don’t know, being given to people we don’t know, based on collateral we don’t see. Would you hand over your money to someone you don’t know with collateral you can’t see? No!

Kudos to Bloomberg for suing for these records, and I hope journalism groups join in the fray. Journalists from around the country should get on this story and request the same information. Write about how this is important and the public interest outweighs any smidgeon of purported privacy of corporations.

The Sunshine in Government Initiative, which includes SPJ, urged this week that Obama foster openness in federal government. In a letter issued Monday, we urged that Obama should:

1. Restore the presumption of disclosure, which was the presumption when Clinton was in office but President Bush flipped it on its head through the Ashcroft memo and Card memo. The presumption should be that a public record is public unless there is some law that states otherwise (not that it’s secret unless a law says it’s public).

2. Create an independent ombudsman. We’ve been waiting for that for a while now. Let’s get rolling.

3. Limit new secrecy exemptions. Enough of the laws and agency policies making things secret.

4. Speak on the record. Senior officials and aides should have the guts to put their names where their mouths are. Speak on the record and be up front with the American public.

For a more detailed (and eloquent) explanation of the recommendations, see the 4-page white paper online.

Quinnipiac University retracted its threat against the SPJ student chapter, thanks to a spanking by The New York Times and other media. According to a story in the Yale Daily News, the Quinnipiac administration officially retracted its threat to ban the SPJ chapter from campus if it continues to interact with an independent online student newspaper. The administration also retracted its prohibition of interviews of administrators, coaches and student athletes.

Finally, the administration came to its senses. If they would have stopped to think a few months ago before attempting to control student journalists maybe they would have avoided the PR mess.

In the meantime, I hope the journalism students at Quinnipiac don’t let this fiasco make them timid or reluctant to promote First Amendment values. The Daily News story states that the SPJ chapter doesn’t interact with the online Quad News anymore, but there’s no reason why they shouldn’t interact. SPJ chapters routinely interact with media outlets.

I also hope this serves as a good lesson to universities everywhere that if they punish students for expressing themselves and practicing good journalism, then they should be prepared for a national thumping. Journalists can not stand by and let educational institutions foster secrecy and censorship. This country, and its future, deserves better.

A Weber State University football star was in court Nov. 6 on assault charges for hitting people with his car back in July. But he’s not the only one facing judgment; the university’s student paper is taking heat from some fans for breaking the story.

The school paper, The Signpost, was the first to break the story when Eteuati was arrested in October for outstanding warrants and called the coaches for reaction. See full story at KSL-TV

and at the Signpost.

The U.S. Department of Justice issued guidelines for federal officials on how to redact documents under FOIA, as per the new amendments passed in the OPEN Government Act of 2007. Now, if you request a federal document and the agency wants to keep some of it secret, it must mark on the form, at each deletion, the exemption that allows the redaction. Also, the DOJ recommends agencies blot out information in black (not white) so people can tell exactly how much of the document was kept secret.

I’m not sure if it will make anything more transparent (any agency can find an exemption that comes close to being valid, whether it is or not), but at least it will make denials more specific and more detailed.

A Denver district court judge ruled last week that records of work-related phone calls made by Gov. Bill Ritter can be kept secret. The Denver Post (see story) had requested the call records of his work-related business that he conducts on his private cellphone. Many other courts around the country have ruled that those types of records would be public, given they pertain to public business.

But not in Colorado. So now government officials are free to conduct public business in secret. Just get a private cell phone and scheme away. The newspaper had offered to have the governor’s private calls redacted, but the governor still refused to provide the phone numbers for the calls he made for public business, claiming it would be an invasion of privacy.

Wow. The whole private cell phone thing is still relatively new to states and the courts, so it may take five to 10 years to get it sorted out, but eventually reason will win out. It takes time for judges to catch up to technology. Even in Colorado, they’ll eventually come to the conclusion, which Harold Cross wrote 55 years ago in The People’s Right to Know: “Public business is the public’s business.” Regardless of the format or technology.